


Punch Drunk on Somebody's Joke

by Basilect



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 18:44:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basilect/pseuds/Basilect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles never says, straight out, that he’s not looking for a relationship. It seems rude and a little presumptuous - it’s not as if Derek has said that he wants anything other than someone to have fun with, either. Even if he did, Stiles knows what happens when you let yourself get involved with a alpha, and no matter how great the sex is he doesn’t need anyone telling him what to do or how to act. Stiles is here to kick ass and take names on his way to becoming the top lawyer in California for civil litigation, bar none. Derek is sweet and funny and a little sarcastic, and he acts like he genuinely likes Stiles, baggage included, but the last thing Stiles needs someone else interfering in his life. He’s fine on his own, thanks.</p><p>Or, a story about learning to get out of your own way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Punch Drunk on Somebody's Joke

**Author's Note:**

> Kenzy's amazing art can be found [HERE](http://paintaire.tumblr.com/post/70161910187/teen-wolf-big-bang-entry-punch-drunk-on), and is linked in the story itself. Please go over and like her work as well, it's truly stunning. 
> 
> Thanks to the mods for organizing the Teen Wolf Big Bang!
> 
> 5/1/14 edit: to fix a few inconsistencies, and also to get my ass in action and pull together a real summary for this thing. My deepest thanks to the commenter who reminded me not to be a lazy shit. ;)

It’s Friday night, and for once, Stiles has managed to leave the firm at a reasonable hour. His latest case has wrapped, so he’s got hardly any work to do this weekend, which is a delight, and he’s young, single, and has cash to spend. When Stiles first got home, his plan had been to change into bar-worthy apparel, gather up Scott, and have a truly epic night out.  
  
Instead, Stiles is sitting on the floor of his best friend’s apartment, working his way through a bottle of cheap whiskey with Scott’s phone wearing a slow bruise into his left butt cheek so Scott can’t give in and call Allison.  
  
“You could have at least sprung for the good stuff,” Stiles bitches, taking as large a gulp as he can manage straight from the bottle and grimacing. “Didn’t we agree that after we graduated, we’d stop drinking horse piss? I’m ten thousand percent sure that was a deal we made.”  
  
“Rebel Yell is a classic,” Scott says absently, and finally deals out cards from the deck he’s been shuffling for at least the last five minutes.  
  
They’re playing Speed, which is generally not considered a drinking game but Stiles thinks it’s hilarious when Scott gets drunk and cards start flying everywhere. It’s the kind of game that moves fast and requires some degree of focus, and that had kind of been the point - Stiles honestly thought that if he had to listen to Scott rehash his break-up (‘she said it just wasn’t working, what do you think that means?’) he might actually blow his brains out. Except right now, he’s winning almost every trick, because Scott is not paying attention. At all. Stiles honestly can’t decide if this is better or worse than the broken-record act from earlier.  
  
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Stiles says, finally, after Scott has actually managed to fuck up the rules so badly that Stiles feels obligated to call renege in a card game that does not actually have reneging rules. “You’re going to borrow a shirt so that you can change into something that doesn’t have a frayed hem and holes in the armpits, I’m going to put on something that doesn’t have whiskey stains on it - thanks for that, by the way - and then we’re both going to go to Magic Eight so you can try and stop thinking about Allison.”  
  
“I’m going to be terrible company at a bar,” Scott protests, and Stiles rolls his eyes.  
  
“I love you, buddy, but you’re terrible company right now,” he says. “At least if we go out, you’re trying to put yourself back out there. And hey, look, maybe you’ll find some nice beta who’ll have sex with you, no strings attached. It’ll be good for you.”  
  
Scott still looks doubtful, and Stiles throws a hand up in a _but wait, there’s more gesture._  
  
“I’ll even buy your drinks tonight,” he says, like it’s the ultimate end to all arguments. “Think of me as your personal open bar and wingman.”  
  
Scott stares at him for a minute, and then, finally, his face cracks into a smile.  
  
“Yeah, okay,” he says, and pushes himself up off the floor. Stiles gives himself a mental high five. “I need to borrow clothes, though.”  
  
“I have just the thing,” Stiles says, and shoves Scott towards his bedroom, and wardrobe options.  
  
When they were younger, in high school and later college, neither of had even a modicum of fashion sense. They’d favored tees and flannels to anything with actual sophistication and shape to it, which Stiles still blames for the fact that he never got laid in high school despite being an omega and supposedly sexual catnip to any alpha in a two hundred yard radius.  
  
Stiles had had to mature his sense of fashion after graduation, though, when he dove into work as a paralegal for, of all people, Jackson Whittemore’s dad. Now, as a junior associate in a posh law firm in San Francisco with a degree from a top school, Stiles’ closet is hung with carefully pressed suits, jeans that actually fit through the hip and thigh, and preppy, brightly colored button-downs.  
  
It is one of these last which Stiles pulls off the hanger holding it up against Scott and humming in approval. It’ll be a little tight in the shoulders, and a little long through the waist, but no one will notice the latter if he tucks it in, and the former is never a bad thing.  
  
“I’ll look like a cherry,” Scott says, looking pained.  
  
“Red is a good color on you,” Stiles says, “and it’ll help you to look less like a mopey sack of sadness.”  
  
“I’m not moping!” Scott protests, and Stiles raises both eyebrows dramatically.  
  
“Do you even hear yourself, dude, moping is all you’ve done all week, I love you but it is absolutely moping and I refuse to let you delude yourself into thinking its anything else.”  
  
Scott gives Stiles the eyes, all pathetic lovability, but Stiles got wise to that trick when they were seven years old and Scott was deploying it in pursuit of the last Oreo.  
  
“Shirt. Now,” Stiles orders. Scott sighs, but he pulls his ratty tee off over his head, which Stiles counts as a win.  
  
They cab it into the bar, because Scott’s salary as a veterinary assistant is not even close to enough to cover rent in a decent part of town where they could walk to the bar, and as far as Stiles is concerned, if they’re going to do this they should do it right.  
  
“Let me cover the fare,” Scott says, and starts to pull out his wallet. Stiles blocks his hand.  
  
“I said I was taking you out, and I meant that,” he says, firm, and Scott grins and climbs out of the cab.  
  
The bar is overcrowded already, people squeezing in along the bar front for drink orders and dancing to the house music versions of top forty hits in the open space between the tables lined against either wall. It’s hot and sweaty and casual, and they order beers - Corona for Stiles and a PBR for Scott, despite Stiles’ repeated protests that they’re not twenty anymore - with a shot of tequila, because Stiles is an asshole.  
  
“Cheers,” Stiles says, and raises the shot glass, waits for Scott to clink them together before tossing it back. He shudders a little against the taste, and grins at Scott.  
  
“Fine, okay, you were right, this was a good idea,” Scott says, and Stiles fist-pumps overdramatically.  
  
“Told you! Come on, I see an open table.”  
  
It’s a high top table with two bar stools pulled up to it, empty beer bottles still on the stained wooden top from the last occupants. Stiles pushes them out of the way to be replaced by his own fuller bottle. He’s tipsy, still, from the drinks they’d taken at Scott’s apartment and then the tequila. He’s thinking, idly, that he might like to dance, when he sees her.  
  
He almost misses her completely, eyes gliding carelessly over the masses of people crowded around the bar in the hopes of finding someone with whom he can distract Scott. It’s her hair that catches his eye at first, and he almost thinks, yeah, her, perfect, before she turns around and Stiles almost falls off the barstool. She’s not perfect, not at all, because that is actually Allison herself.  
  
“Hey, buddy,” Stiles says, hurriedly, because if he can distract Scott they might actually make it out of here unscathed, “I don’t know, I’m just really not feeling this place, you wanna see what the crowd at Cooper’s is like tonight-”  
  
It’s already too late, though, because the second Scott looks up from his beer, Allison moves into his line of sight, bright and laughing and unaware, and everything Scott has missed so much over the last week. Stiles could thump himself when he sees Scott’s entire face brighten.  
  
“I’m gonna, I’m just, watch m’drink, mkay?” Scott says, slides off the barstool, a little wobblier than Stiles would like, and makes a beeline for the group of girls clustered around the bar. Stiles swears, scoops up both beers, and hurries after him.  
  
“Scott, this is a terrible idea,” Stiles calls, ineffectually, because Scott is already insinuating himself into Allison’s circle, smooth and harmless and smiling. Allison must be drunk too, because Stiles can see the way her face softens, just a bit, when Scott presents himself before her.  
  
Stiles glances around hopelessly for backup, but he doesn’t recognize any of Allison’s posse. Friends from work, he assumes, or cousins or visiting friends - it doesn’t matter, because it means Stiles has no one to help him hustle Scott away from the ticking time bomb that is talking to Allison, and when he tries to slide in next to Scott, the circle tightens up against him. One girl gives him a slightly disdainful look, and Stiles could bite her for the way she so clearly reads him as Scott’s desperate omega sidekick.  
  
“Fine,” Stiles mutters, and steps back, raising his hands defensively and almost spilling the beers onto himself. “You are on your own now, Scotty. Don’t come crying to me tomorrow.”  
  
Over the heads of the girls, Scott catches Stiles’ eye and winks.  
  
Fuck his life.  
  
Just for that, Stiles chugs the last half of Scott’s beer, because if Scott going to make poor decisions then he doesn’t get his drink back. Stiles considers his own beer, and slugs that back too, just for good measure, and stalks off to get another. Fuck this.  
  
The bartenders are bombarded, overworked, and they hardly give Stiles a second glance when he tries to flag one down. It’s not their _fault_ , he knows, there are at least fifty people clamoring for refills and only three people working, but it’s one thing to understand that objectively and another completely to keep himself from taking it as a personal affront.  
  
Stiles groans and lays his head down on the bar, which is a terrible idea because it smells like stale beer and old vomit and pine-sol. It’s also sticky, and Stiles pulls himself upright almost immediately to paw at his face. Someone next to him laughs, and shoves a beer under Stiles’ nose.  
  
“You look like you need it more than I do,” says the man standing next to him, all biceps and tight white shirt and a small smile. Everything about him sends Stiles’ hormones into overtime, and Stiles is shocked he didn’t actually scent him from across the club, the way he just screams sex. Stiles is accepting the bottle before he realizes what he’s doing.  
  
He’s downed almost half the bottle before he remembers what a bad idea it is to take drinks from alphas he’s never met before. Goddamn it, this is how people get drugged and dragged off to be raped and murdered, Stiles has seen this episode of _How to Catch a Predator._  
  
“You didn’t roofie this or anything, did you?” Stiles asks, eying the man suspiciously.  
  
“It’d be a little late now if I had,” he points out, and then grimaces. “Uh, sorry. No, I didn’t, though. Look, here, if it makes you feel better--”  
  
He reaches over and plucks the beer from Stiles’ grasp, and takes a long, deep gulp from it. Stiles’ eyes are drawn to the line of his throat, and he has to give himself a little shake. Head in the game, Stilinski.  
  
“Right, right, I get the idea,” Stiles says, and tugs the beer out of the man’s hand. “I swear normally I’m not this desperate for a drink, but I need this.”  
  
“Everything okay?” the man asks, earnest, and Stiles almost laughs at how much he wants to just eat him up.  
  
“My best friend is making poor life decisions, but that’s not unusual,” he says. “I’m Stiles.”  
  
“Derek,” the man says, reaching out to clasp Stiles’ outstretched hand, and if Stiles notes the sheer size of that palm, well, it’s the alcohol. “Your name is actually Stiles?”  
  
“Don’t be hating,” Stiles says, mildly. “You’d’ve fallen over trying to pronounce my given name.”  
  
“Stiles, then,” Derek says. “So, what happened with your friend?”  
  
He’s not quite sure how, but Stiles finds himself telling Derek the whole story, from high school romance to the more recent on-again, off-again disaster that Allison and Scott have had going for the last three years.  
  
“College, sure, they did long distance okay,” Stiles says, and he’s narrating vigorously enough with his hands that they have what is a shocking amount of space for Magic Eight on a Friday night. “But it fell apart when they tried being back in the same place, again. It’s been over for at least the last fifteen months, but Scott won’t admit it, and Allison can’t just let him go.”  
  
It’s the fairest assessment Stiles has had been able to make in ages, and it feels good, to tell someone that his best friend is just dragging out the inevitable. Derek just nods.  
  
“You’re a good friend, then,” he says, eyes dark and serious in a way that makes Stiles want to jump his bones.  
  
“And yet, he still ditched me for her,” Stiles says, wry, and regrets it when Derek’s face goes distressed. “No, don’t worry about it, I can handle myself. New wave omega, right here. I don’t need a chaperone.”  
  
“Still,” Derek says, and Stiles is too drunk at this point to try and interpret the expression on Derek’s face.  
  
Instead of trying, he says, “God, you’re attractive. Come dance with me,” and tugs Derek to the dance floor, where he can grind up against him and kiss his ridiculous mouth.  
  
It’s a surprise to exactly no one when they tumble into a taxi together, Derek giving the cab driver directions while Stiles tries his damnedest to make him mess up his own address.  
  
“I don’t get you,” Derek murmurs, against the soft skin where Stiles’ ear meets his jawline.  
  
Stiles just laughs at Derek, and kisses him long and filthy, ignoring the cabbie when he coughs pointedly and adjusts the radio.  
  
Stiles has a nice apartment, about what befits a well-paid professional with mountains of debt, but Derek’s building is one of the fancy downtown lofts, and the lobby is posh enough that Stiles actually stops trying to slip his hands down Derek’s jeans.  
  
“This is where you live?” he says, skeptically. “I thought you owned a bar.”  
  
“Uh,” Derek says. “Family money?”  
  
“Mafia,” says Stiles, after a pause. “Your family runs the San Francisco Mafia, don’t they? I can deal with Mafia, I think.”  
  
Derek laughs helplessly against Stiles’ shoulder, and Stiles takes the opportunity to pull Derek’s shirt off over his head. He has to stop for a minute, after that, because Derek is fucking beautiful half-naked, and it’s only the elevator doors pinging at them impatiently that motivates him to stop touching Derek’s chest. Stiles could have this in a bed, after all.  
  
Stiles whips his shirt off as soon as they get into Derek’s apartment, almost tearing the bottom buttons off the seam in his hurry, and Derek’s hands are immediately on him, warm against Stiles’ skin.  
  
The apartment is as nice inside as outside in the lobby, but Stiles doesn’t bother to stop and look around, not when he’s dizzy from the combination of alcohol and Derek’s mouth on his.  
  
Derek backs them into the bedroom, and Stiles almost pulls them both over when he runs the back of his knees into the edge of Derek’s mattress. Derek breaks off, laughing, and Stiles swats at his shoulder.  
  
“That was your fault,” Stiles says, and Derek doesn’t bother with a rejoinder before his hands are working industriously at Stiles belt, tugging at the waist of Stiles’ jeans while Stiles shimmies out of them. His boxers make it off at same time, and then Stiles is naked on Derek’s bed. Derek sucks a kiss into the skin of Stiles’ belly before he pulls back to just look at Stiles, eyes dark and unreadable. It’s long enough to make Stiles uncomfortable, so he reaches up and pulls Derek back down to him, where he can kiss Derek’s ridiculously pretty face and slide his hands into the waistband of his pants.  
  
“Let me,” Derek gasps, against Stiles’ mouth, “I want to-” and before he’s actually made a complete sentence, Derek is sliding down the length of Stiles’ body pressing a chain of kisses along his sternum, his hipbone, teasing against the inside of Stiles’ thigh until he wiggles from impatience and ticklishness. Finally, finally, Derek gets his mouth around Stiles’ cock, swallowing down the length of him. Stiles shouts, and his hips jerk up reflexively. Derek grasps him, one broad hand on either hip, and holds in down into the mattress, humming around Stiles’ cock. It doesn’t make it any easier for Stiles to keep his hips from rolling up, and he groans, hands scrabbling in the sheets for something, anything to grab onto as Derek drags his lips back up the length of him.  
  
Derek just keeps working him like that, one hand coming up to cup Stiles’ balls, and Stiles knows that despite his best intentions, he’s not going to last long like this.  
  
“Derek,” he manages to gasp out, hands coming town to wrap in Derek’s hair, “Derek I can’t - I want-” but he can’t even get that much out before Derek grins, his mouth around the head of Stiles’ cock, rolls his tongue against the bottom of Stiles’ cock, that make him jerk his hips up again, and he might honestly be the hottest thing Stiles has ever seen in his life. He could come like this, he thinks, and doesn’t want to, not when there are so many other things he wants to try with Derek.  
  
“Come back here, “ Stiles says, and pulls Derek pack up to him, leaning up into Derek’s mouth and an open, filthy kiss. Stiles can taste himself in Derek’s mouth.  
  
“I want to fuck you,” Derek murmurs, into his mouth so Stiles swears he feels the words more than he hears them. “Can I?”  
  
“God, yes,” Stiles gasps, and Derek grins against his mouth, kissing him hard with a hand coming up to curl around Stiles’ throat. the other stroking down Stiles’ side until Stiles whimpers and wiggles under him, wet with anticipation.  
  
Derek laughs, he sounds pleased more than anything, and so Stiles doesn’t care, especially not when Derek sits back enough to flip Stiles over, one large hand lingering on the small of Stiles’ back.  
  
“God, you’re beautiful,” Derek says, quietly enough that Stiles isn’t sure he knows he said that out loud.  
  
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Stiles says, impatient. “Derek, please, just do it, I want you to-”  
  
It’s not as if Derek needs much convincing, and he slides his hand down along the curve of Stiles’ ass to slip in two fingers. Stiles can’t help but arch into it, shameless as Derek leans down to tease at Stiles’ rim with his tongue, Stiles wet around his fingers. Derek just slides another finger into Stiles, rolls them around like he’s marveling at how wet Stiles is.  
  
“I need a condom,” he says, leaning forward to say it with his lips pressed against Stiles’s spine.  
  
Stiles swears at him. “If you don’t have one, Derek, I swear to god, I’m going to kill you.”  
  
“Just- give me a second,” Derek says, and then he’s sliding his fingers out of Stiles, who whimpers at the loss.  
  
He’s back quickly, though, and Stiles can hear the crinkle of foil as Derek fumbles in trying to tear it open. Stiles rolls his hips against the mattress, partly out of eagerness and partly to be a tease, and is rewarded by a bitten-off groan from overhead, Derek’s hand coming down to dig into the side of his hip. The head of his cock bumps against Stiles’ ass before Derek slides into him, easy and sure until he’s sunk into the hilt. Stiles is gasping into the sheets, noises he doesn’t intend and can’t quite help.  
  
“Shit,” he manages. “Oh shit, fuck me, please-”  
  
It’s all the permission Derek needs to start moving, fucking into Stiles with short thrusts that make Stiles gasp each time Derek bottoms out. It slides from careful to rough quickly, from there, hard and fast and just how Stiles like it. Almost before Stiles even realizes, he’s coming, long spurts against the sheets just from the friction of it and Derek inside him. It doesn’t take much longer before Derek’s hips stutter in their rhythm, getting careless, frantic as Derek slides over the edge.  
  
He collapses down on top of Stiles, chest flush to his back, pinning him against the mattress, and Stiles tries to catch his breath. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, not with a large, muscular guy lying on top of him, but Stiles isn’t complaining. After a minute, though Derek rolls to the side, pulls Stiles up against him.  
  
“That was - that was great,” Stiles says, into the side of Derek’s throat. He’s blissed out and happy, thinks he could actually fall asleep like this. “Thanks, by the way, for not, y’know, knotting me. ‘Preciate it.”  
  
“You didn’t tell me I could,” Derek says, and his voice is muffled but he still sounds a little confused.  
  
Stiles’ lips quirk up into something like a smile. “Still,” he says, drowsy and only half-paying attention to what he’s saying, “lots of guys would have anyway. Lots of guys have.”  
  
But Derek tightens up against him and pulls back a little, all the little bits of contentment and pleasure that Stiles had been picking up fading, like when you can’t quite catch a scent that was only just there. Stiles does a mental run-through of what he’s just said, and then could actually smack himself.  
  
It’s not like Derek couldn’t know, objectively, that Stiles has had sex with other people. For fucks sake, he’s twenty-seven, and also just had sex with Derek only a few hours after they met, but it’s not like he’d needed to rub it in, especially not the fact that yes, other alphas have fucked him, and yes, other alphas have knotted him, both with and without Stiles’ explicit permission. Stiles knows how possessive alphas get, especially after sex. Honestly, Stiles likes it, likes the weight of Derek half on top of him where so Stiles can smell sex and sweat and pick up on the bits of tired pleasure and a stray thought of mine from the other man.  
  
So Stiles just strokes his fingers through Derek’s hair, and murmurs sweet, stupid things into Derek’s ear until Derek, cautiously, relaxes back against him, and Stiles can roll his head back, cracking his neck a little, and say, “so what do you do, Derek Hale, to have this kind of apartment?”

————

Stiles wakes up early, the sun only just starting to reach into Derek’s bedroom, face smooshed into the pillow with Derek’s arm thrown over him possessively. It’s - perfect, actually, comfortable and content, and part of Stiles wants to just close his eyes and go back to sleep.  
  
He really, really has to piss, though. He’s been here long enough anyway, Stiles tells himself, as he wakes enough to remember where he is and who he’s with. He should have left before he fell asleep.  
  
Stiles wiggles out from Derek carefully, tries not to wake him up as he stands and scratches at his balls. The bathroom is obvious, and Stiles snatches his boxers off the floor on his way in.  
  
When he steps back out, boxers slung low on his hips, Derek is awake, sitting up against the headboard and watching Stiles with his arms crossed, a half smile hovering on his lips. Stiles wants, very much, to crawl up the mattress and rest his head in Derek’s lap, let him pet his head and maybe fall back asleep, have slow morning sex in a few hours, maybe.  
  
Instead, Stiles rubs the back of his head and grins, wide and fake cheerful.  
  
“I should probably head out,” Stiles says, and he sounds sheepish even to himself. “Have you seen my shirt?”  
  
“Far corner,” Derek says. He’s not smiling anymore, but he nods pleasantly enough in the direction he means, and Stiles gets dressed while Derek watches from the bed. It makes him self-conscious, even though Derek has seen him stretched out, naked and begging for it.  
  
“Well,” Stiles says, as he tugs his shirt to hang straight on his shoulders. “I’ll see you around then, I guess.”  
  
“Yeah,” Derek says, and hesitates, glancing away to the wall before back at Stiles, catching his eye. Stiles stands stock still under Derek’s gaze.  
  
“Give me your phone number,” Derek says - asks, really, and Stiles flushes. He tosses his phone in Derek’s direction, an easy underhand, almost before he realizes he’s pulled it out of his pocket.  
  
When he looks at it later, in the cab on the way back to his own apartment, it’s still on the contact page for _Derek Hale,_ and Stiles goes red again, feeling shy and pleased and angry at himself for it. It was just a hook-up, he tells himself, and isn’t even sure why he has to remind himself that. He calls Scott, who at least can be reliably counted on to make stupider decisions than even Stiles himself, and resolves to delete the contact later.

————

Stiles never actually deletes the number, lets himself be distracted by Scott and the continually compounding Allison woes instead. The two of them sit on the floor and watch the baseball game, muted so they don’t have to listen to the bullshit the announcers spew every other word, and Scott moans about how she’d told him sleeping together again was a mistake. She doesn’t want to hear from him again, Scott says, and warned him not to call again. Stiles makes all the right noises, sympathetic and mournful, and even proves himself to be the very best of best friends by running out to the liquor store a few blocks away when the beer runs out sometime around two. He might not ever actually delete Derek’s number, but he’s certainly not thinking about calling. By the time Stiles goes back to work on Monday, he’s nearly got himself convinced that he doesn’t even remember that he has the contact information.  
  
Except then, on Tuesday afternoon when Stiles is on his way to a meeting, his phone beeps twice from his pocket. He pulls it out, expecting the text to be some stupid comment or silly thought from Scott, and almost chokes when he sees _Derek Hale [unlock to see content]_ on the lock screen.  
  
Stiles steps back against the hallway wall to let a small group of second year law interns go past, hardly noticing the curious looks they toss him as he fumbles his passcode in.  
  
 _Let me take you out to dinner tomorrow night._  
  
“Shitfuck,” Stiles mutters, and glares at one of the interns when she titters.  
  
It’s the middle of the work day, Stiles hasn’t had anything to eat today, and he’s expected to present at a meeting at which one of the senior partners will be present. He doesn’t have the time or energy for this right now, and so Stiles tucks the phone back into his pocket, resolves to forget about it for at least the next hour and a half, and marches off down the hallway.  
  
He expects to come out of the meeting having nailed his presentation. Stiles has been working on it for ages, ever since he heard about this upcoming case - it’s the first thing that he’s had the opportunity to work on that’s really in his field of interest, and Stiles genuinely believes he can do good work on this case. Their client, the plaintiff, is an omega who’d mated with and married an alpha, started a company and a family with him, and now he’s leaving her and trying to take their kids and the company. If it was two betas, it’d be fairly cut and dry, and could probably be settled without ever going to a courtroom, but there’s still a decent number of laws on the books which restrict the rights of mated omegas, and entire binders worth of precedent which says that their plaintiff isn’t entitled to anything. This case is the opportunity to overturn some of that, especially with the evidence that indicates that there was domestic violence occurring in the relationship, and Stiles had been genuinely excited about it. They had a chance to do something good, here.  
  
That is, until the senior partner turned to his assistant and said, not even bothering to be quiet about it, “I like where this is going, but can we get a different associate on this? I’m afraid this one will get emotionally involved. And the defense has an alpha leading their team,” and nods knowingly, like just because Stiles is an omega means he’s going to get over-invested in the case and screw up, or be overcome by hormones at the sight of an alpha or some _complete bullshit_ like that.  
  
And the thing is, Stiles knows that attitude is still really prevalent, especially among people over sixty. He’s been faced with it a countless number of times, and has worked twice as hard as he might have otherwise to prove that it’s not true, but it still just pisses him off to have his work maligned just because of what he is.  
  
Stiles storms out of the conference room when the meeting is adjourned and straight into the office of the junior partner who has become a mentor through Stiles’ transition into the firm.  
  
“If I don’t get to be part of this case, I’m quitting and then suing for workplace discrimination,” Stiles announces, and tosses a copy of his presentation onto Harris’ desk, not caring in the slightest when Harris looks absolutely appalled, and then turns on his heel and stalks back out.  
  
He pulls his phone out as he heads back toward his own office. He’s not some pushover who can be won over by a good fuck and maybe a nice dinner. Yes, he’ll go out with Derek, but Stiles is going to do it on his own terms, like the independent, capable adult he has worked so hard to be.  
  
 _Drinks instead. The Misery, over on 4th. meet me at 8. I’m buying._  
  
 _Yeah, okay,_ Derek responds, almost immediately, followed a beat later by, _Looking_ and Stiles is briefly amused at the thought of Derek waiting by his phone. It’s a silly, but it actually cheers Stiles up a little bit. 

Stiles really, truly expects drinks with Derek to be awful. He recognizes, to himself even if he’s not going to admit it, that his text had been a little aggressive, and Stiles knows that if Derek had said the same time to him, Stiles would have told him off for being a dick. He ends up being late when he spends too long fussing between two different shirt options, and thinks, ruefully, that Derek would be entirely within his rights to have left already.  
  
Instead, Derek is waiting patiently at a corner table, looks quietly pleased to see him.  
  
“I know you said you were buying,” Derek says, “but I ordered us a round to get started.”  
  
He pushes a lowball glass toward Stiles, who can’t help the grin on his face as he he slides into the open chair.  
  
“No one in the city does an old fashioned like this place,” Stiles says, and Derek smiles back.  
  
“It’s pretty good,” Derek says.  
  
“You, uh, said you own a bar now, right?” Stiles says. “Are you allowed to say that?”  
  
Derek flushes a little, color high on his cheeks, and Stiles resolutely does not find that really endearing.  
  
“Yeah, actually,” Derek says, and ducks his head a little. “This is my bar.”  
  
“You own _Misery Loves Company?_ ” Stiles says - okay, fine, it’s almost a screech, but look, this is actually one of his single favorite bars. “I love this place! No way, you’re full of shit.”  
  
“He’s not,” offers the bartender, and Stiles jumps a little bit. He hadn’t noticed her, which in retrospect is a little silly given that the place is nearly empty and she’s practically hanging over the bar like she doesn’t care that she’s eavesdropping. “Derek Hale, lamest man to ever own a bar.”  
  
“Jesus christ, Erica,” Derek mutters, and Stiles is absolutely thrilled at his obvious embarrassment.  
  
“I can’t believe you didn’t say something,” Stiles says. “We could have gone somewhere else! I didn’t recognize you at all, I’m here all the time.”  
  
“I don’t usually work the bar,” Derek admits. “Erica says I don’t have the ‘presence’ to bartend.”  
  
“He’s the worst,” Erica confirms. “You should’ve seen him when you told him this is where you wanted to come, though. He was like a friggin’ child.”  
  
Derek goes bright red, and Stiles honestly doesn’t know what to do with that. Alphas aren’t supposed to be embarrassed about what they want. He’d always thought that was kind of the point.  
  
Stiles kind of wants to reach out and touch Derek’s wrist, something small and tender and reassuring that says, _I’m here, we’re in your place, this is me, for you._ But this is only the second time Stiles has even met Derek, the first time sober, so instead, he lets the corner of his mouth curl up in a small smirk, and says,  
  
“Does this mean I’m in your territory?” and relishes the way Derek’s eyes darken.  
  
“I think that’s my cue,” Erica says, pointedly, but Stiles doesn’t really care. He’s not here for her.  
  
“Go away,” Derek orders, his gaze not so much as twitching from Stiles’ face but somehow still managing to be entirely directed at Erica, and something deep in Stiles’ gut ignites.  
  
He won’t remember, tomorrow, what else they talk about as much as he’ll remember the feeling in the air, compressed, like the world had narrowed to include only him and Derek. Stiles confesses too much of himself, he knows, but Derek does, too, and when they fall into bed together, hours and hours later, it feels like a consummation. 

————

Claudia Stilinski died on a Friday in May, exactly fifteen years ago. It's hard to mark a single day, Stiles thinks, just like he does every time the anniversary of her death rolls around. Claudia's death had been slow and drawn out, torturous for everyone involved and sometimes it feels like Stiles' whole life revolves around mourning her. She'd been asleep most of the time toward the end. "I don't want to die in a hospital bed," she'd insisted, once it'd become clear that the treatment wasn't working. No one had ever been able to say no to her, least of all Stiles or the Sheriff, and so her last month was spent in a jerry-rigged sickbed in the living room. Stiles remembers pulling the armchair up next to the bed and just watching her, counting each breath frantically, like each one could have been the last.   
  
She woke up, just for a minute, right at the very end, just opened her eyes and smiled at Stiles.   
  
"Don't worry too much, okay, baby? You'll be okay," she'd said, and all Stiles could do was shake his head.  
  
He should have driven up to Beacon Hills for the anniversary. Taken the day off work so he could visit her grave and drink whiskey with his dad.  
  
It’s too hard, though, even fifteen years later, and Stiles calls his dad in the morning instead, and pretends like that’s good enough.  
  
“Sorry I’m not there,” he says, in response to the Sheriff’s quietly gruff ‘hey, son.’  
  
“Busy down there in the big city?” the Sheriff says, and Stiles squirms.  
  
“Guess so,” Stiles says. “You going to the cemetery today?”  
  
“It’s raining up here. I’ll wait till it lets up,” the Sheriff says. “Melissa’s going to come along, too. She says hi.”  
  
“Is she there now?”  
  
“Nah. But she’ll say that when I see her, so.”  
  
“Yeah,” Stiles says, and they lapse into silence.  
  
“Got a new case,” Stiles offers. “It’s going to be a settlement, probably.”  
  
“That’s good,” the Sheriff says. “Speeding tickets are up ten percent this month.”  
  
“Gotta make budget or something?” Stiles drawls, and the Sheriff laughs, crackly through the cell phone speaker.  
  
“Something like that. Nah, they changed a traffic light pattern on the edge of town, so folks get some speed going coming down that hill over by the Wal-Mart without having to stop at the bottom.”  
  
“Fascinating. Truly,” Stiles says. “Ladies and gentlemen, the life of a county sheriff. Don’t you all just wish you were him.”  
  
“You’re a little shit, you know that?” the Sheriff says, but he sounds fond. “I hear from Melissa who got it from Scott that you got some new man taking you around the city.”  
  
“Oh my god, you guys are worse than a group of preteens!” Stiles exclaims. “What, did you set up a Stitch and Bitch knitting circle or something? Jesus Christ, Dad!”  
  
“I’ll take that as a yes, then. You like him?”  
  
“It’s not serious,” Stiles mutters.  
  
“Nothing’s ever going to be if you don’t let it,” the Sheriff points out. “And that’s not what I asked, anyway.”  
  
Stiles throws his free hand up in the air, even though his dad can’t see him do it. “Sure, yes, I like him. He’s fine. Is that what you want to hear? I’m not dating him. I’m not dating anyone, I don’t want to date anyone, I don’t have any desire to put up with that shit. He’s just some stupid alpha I’m fucking, how’s that for you?”  
  
“Christ, Stiles,” the Sheriff says.  
  
“Sorry,” Stiles mutters. “Look, I don’t get why we’re doing this right now. I called because Mom died fifteen years ago today, and I miss her, not to get scolded about my life choices.”  
  
The Sheriff sighs. “No, you’re right. I just worry about you, son. I keep thinking about Claudia. She would have wanted you to be happy.”  
  
“I am happy,” Stiles says.  
  
“Yeah, okay,” the Sheriff says, and he sounds tired. “Come up and visit soon, okay? I miss you, kid.”  
  
“Yeah, I will,” Stiles promises. “Maybe next weekend. Tell Ms. McCall I said hi, back.”  
  
“Will do. Love you.”  
  
Stiles stares at his phone for a few seconds after the screen flashes ‘call ended’ at him, and seriously considers chucking it at the wall. He calls Scott, instead.  
  
“I have to go to the office for a few hours, but come over after so we can drink to my mom,” he says, into Scott’s voicemail. “Four o’clock or so, you know how to get in if I’m not back yet.”  
  
Work is terrible, even for just a a few hours, Stiles unable to get over his funk and get anything done. His coworkers keep on tossing him weird looks, which Stiles supposes is fair given that he’s been making little balls out of scrap paper and throwing them at the wall for the last half hour or so.  
  
“God, go home if that’s all you’re going to do today,” says Michele as she walks by, and Stiles sneers at her. He’s always thought Michele was kind of a bitch.  
  
About ten minutes later, though, Stiles gives in and admits that she’s right. It’s only three o’clock, but he shoves a pile of papers into a brown accordion folder and grabs his phone and keys.  
  
“Working remotely,” he hollers out into the hallway, in case anyone cares. It’s a lie, of course. Stiles is going to go home and do exactly zero work, but fuck it, whatever. He’ll come in early tomorrow or - or something. 

————

_Sooper troopers is on hbo tonite_ Derek texts, when Stiles is three beers into a solid mope. _Come watch if youre free._  
  
“Who’s that?” Scott asks, leaning to try to peer over Stiles’ shoulder. Stiles jerks his phone away reflexively.  
  
“No one,” he says, and Scott snorts.  
  
“Booty call, then? What’s that guy’s name, again?”  
  
“It’s not a booty call,” Stiles says, peevish. “Sooper Troopers is on, apparently.”  
  
“You love that movie!” Scott exclaims.  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes. “Yeah, dude, I know. So do you. It’s on HBO, go turn on the TV.”  
  
Scott fidgets next to him, and Stiles side-eyes him.  
  
“I told Allison I’d come over tonight,” Scott mutters, and Stiles throws his hands up in the air, not really caring when beer sloshes out the bottleneck.  
  
“Seriously, Scott? Allison?”  
  
“I couldn’t really say no!” Scott exclaims. “It’s the first time she’s wanted to talk to me in two weeks!”  
  
“Right,” says Stiles. “Why are you feeding into that? You know you’re just going to be more miserable afterward.”  
  
“Yeah,” Scott says. “I think it’ll be good, though. Closure. Or something like that.”  
  
“You just keep telling yourself that,” Stiles says. “When are you going there?”  
  
“Soon as you leave,” Scott says, and Stiles rolls his eyes.  
  
“Fine, fine, you’re off the hook,” Stiles says, and Scott throws an arm over his shoulder and pulls him in for an awkward, smooshed hug.  
  
“Love you, bro,” Scott says, and Stiles has to squeeze his eyes shut for a minute just to keep himself together.  
  
“Yeah, you too,” he mutters, and pulls back. “Okay, get out of here, try and win your girl back or whatever.”  
  
“I’ll call you later,” Scott promises, and practically skips out the door.  
  
“He’s just going to get his heart broken again,” Stiles tells the empty beer bottles, but they don’t have much to say. He sighs and scoops them up so he can carry them to the recycling bin where he can drop them down, one by one, to crash against each other.  
  
Stiles glances around the apartment, where the detritus of his afternoon is still scattered across the floor and couch. He should clean up now, but fuck it. Instead, Stiles grabs a sweatshirt from the arm of of the couch, and slips out the door. It’s drizzling outside, not enough to make Stiles wish for an umbrella but wet enough that Stiles is damp and shivery by the time he gets to Derek’s apartment.  
  
"Everything okay?" Derek says, and Stiles shakes himself out, forces his spine ramrod straight and smiles. It’s possible this isn’t exactly the healthiest way to get through the anniversary of his mom’s death, but fuck it. No one’s ever told Stiles he makes great decisions.  
  
"Yeah, I'm good," he says. "How you been?"  
  
Derek looks doubtful, but he steps back and pulls Stiles into his apartment with a light hand to Stiles' hip. "Better now."  
  
"Cheesy."  
  
"Yeah," Derek admits, and pushes the door shut with one hand with the other still on Stiles' hip. One finger finds a space between the hem of Stiles' shirt and the edge of his jeans, and Stiles' abdomen tightens in an unintentional shiver. Derek grins and leans into kiss him, light and quick until Stiles reaches out and pulls Derek back in, bodies flush.   
  
"No interest in dinner, then," Derek says, and Stiles grins at the hitch in his voice.   
  
"Nah," he says. "Not really.”  
  
It’s later, much later, when Stiles rolls his face into Derek’s armpit and squeezes his eyes shut tight. They’re tangled up in each others bodies, and sweat is drying on their skin, Derek already half-asleep, and Stiles can pretend that any tears that prick against his eyelids are just his eyes watering.  
  
“What was your mom like?” Stiles asks, before he can stop himself. Derek is quiet for a moment, and Stiles isn’t sure if Derek even actually heard. He’s talking into Derek’s armpit, after all.  
  
“She died,” Derek says, finally. Stiles can feel his heart beating, steady in all the places Stiles is touching his chest. “There was a fire when I was sixteen. A lot of my family died. I miss them all, but - my mom was the head of the family, and it was hard not to get kind of lost without her. And she was great. I miss her every day.”  
  
Stiles bites his lip and presses his forehead into Derek’s side, and he has to bite his lip for a minute to keep it together.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, when he thinks he can manage words. “Yeah, I miss my mom too.”  
  
“Two regular orphan Annies,” Derek says, and tugs Stiles up over top of himself until Derek can kiss him full on the mouth, easy and sweet.

————

Derek’s alarm goes off appallingly early the next morning, earlier than even Stiles, who keeps weird hours and works long days, can manage.  
  
“Augh,” he groans, flailing aimlessly, and Derek is shushing him with a hand down the side of Stiles’ face before Stiles can get too tangled up.  
  
“Don’t get up yet,” Derek says. “It’s early.”  
  
“No shit,” Stiles says, but subsides. He collapses back into the pillow but doesn’t close his eyes, watching curiously as Derek gets up and pulls a tee shirt on in the dark. He hums quietly to himself as he slips out the door, and Stiles can hear him moving around in the kitchen - the refrigerator opening and closing, pans shifting as one of their mates is pulled out from under them. Stiles is profoundly curious, but he lays in bed anyway, obedient.  
  
It takes about fifteen minutes before Derek comes back in, flicking the light on with his elbow while he balances two plates and mugs precariously.  
  
“Breakfast?” Stiles asks, delightedly, and Derek quirks a smile at him.  
  
“Seemed like a day for it,” he says. “Start it off a little better than yesterday, or something.”  
  
“Yesterday was fine,” Stiles says, and Derek gives him a look that says exactly how transparent Stiles really is.  
  
“Okay,” is all he says, though, as he perches on the edge of the bed. Stiles grabs the plates so Derek can wiggle backward until he’s sitting against the headboard and they can split up the coffees and the piles of eggs and toast Derek loaded onto each plate. They eat quietly, legs pressed together under the blankets, and Stiles’ whole body feels warm and pleased.  
  
“Thanks,” Stiles says eventually, low, and when he glances over at Derek, Derek is just looking at him, his expression soft and wide open. Stiles thinks, somewhere in the back of his head, that this should make him uncomfortable, but instead, Stiles just smiles helplessly back. 

————

Stiles hits his heat around a month and a half after he first meets Derek. Stiles knows it’s coming. He’s never been surprised by a heat in his life, except maybe his first, and even then, his mom was there to warn him, tell him what to do. Stiles has friends who’ve had to scramble to get home, for whom heats come up fast and hard and hit them when they’re least expecting it. Stiles has a few friends who have ended up in trouble that way, stuck somewhere they can’t trust the people around them and can’t get out. It’s ended badly, before.  
  
Stiles though, feels his heats coming like a low-grade fever. He starts feeling a little off a few days before, twitchy, like his skin doesn’t quite fit. Eyes linger on Stiles just a hair longer than they would otherwise, folks not even aware that they’re gravitating toward him.  
  
It’s like moths, his mom told him, once or twice. We smell things and we react to them without even realizing it ourselves.  
  
Usually, Stiles hates it. Four times a year his fucking hormones and body chemistry shift enough that he can’t just ignore them, and Stiles has to practically rearrange his entire life to accommodate his heat. It’s the kind of stupid shit that seems to feed right into all the jokes and snide comments about omegas.  
  
This time though, things are a little different. Even Stiles will admit that the sex is fucking fantastic when he’s in heat. It’ll go on for hours, heavy and desperate and completely satisfying. It’s been a while - too long, Lydia tells him - since Stiles had someone he was willing to share that with. Stiles thinks, a little giddy, that he wouldn’t mind going through his heat this time if Derek’s around.  
  
And so on Wednesday morning, when Stiles wakes up hot and flushed, desperately horny, he just grins to himself. He’s not quite there yet, not all the way - Stiles will go to work today - but he’s close. Stiles rolls over onto Derek, kissing him awake, and when Derek opens his eyes and smiles under Stiles’ mouth, Stiles grinds down onto him. It’s barely six thirty and they both have work, but they fuck anyway, Stiles grinding down onto Derek’s cock while Derek gasps out his name. Stiles comes too fast, spurting against both their bellies, dizzy with it all.  
  
They shower together, afterward, too sleepy now to manage anything more than a slow, sensuous roll around each other as they soap off. It’s been a while since Stiles was with someone during his heat, and even though he knows he shouldn’t, that it’s too soon, Stiles can’t keep himself from reveling in the way Derek touches him, gentle and easy and possessive.  
  
In the end, Stiles has to run three lights to get to work on time. He catches sight of himself in the mirrored elevator on the way up to the office, and almost misses his floor trying to make the buttons on his shirt line up properly. He forgot his tie altogether, and Stiles is pretty sure Harris’ intern thinks he’s legitimately certifiable by the look she gives him.  
  
“I’m taking Thursday and Friday off. Personal reasons,” Stiles tells Harris, who rolls his eyes but is legally required to grant the time ever since the 1995 amendment to the Equal Employment Act. Stiles gets four days off every three months for his heat, no advance notice required, and Harris can suck on that.  
  
Except then, sometime in the midmorning, Derek calls.  
  
Stiles answers on the first ring, just because he can, and can’t help smiling into the phone as he says,  
  
“Hey.”  
  
“Hi,” Derek says. “Hey, look, I just wanted to warn you - I won’t be around for the next few days. Family stuff.”  
  
Stiles wonders, for a very brief second, if this is just a really shitty dream.  
  
“It came up kind of suddenly,” Derek continues, talking very fast. “I’m driving home this afternoon, I just didn’t - yeah. Wanted to warn you.”  
  
“Right,” Stiles says, knee-jerk. “Right, yeah, I - thanks. For the warning.”  
  
“Thanks,” Derek echoes. “I’ll call you later.”  
  
Stiles holds the phone up by his ear for several long seconds after Derek’s already hung up on him. It’s possible he’s hallucinating. He’s never had a hallucination before, but it’s possible.  
  
Very carefully, Stiles sets the phone on his desk, and then leans forward until his forehead is resting on the desk as well. His skin is sticking to a loose piece of paper but the wood underneath is cool and solid. It helps him focus on something other than the shivery feeling under his skin, the warning of his oncoming heat.  
  
Okay. Right. This isn’t that big of a deal. Stiles has spent dozens, probably hundreds, of heats on his own. The thought of having Derek around, keeping him in bed for four days, that had just been a really nice fantasy. It’s not as if they’d ever talked about Stiles’ heat coming up.  
  
But, no. There’s no way in hell Derek hadn’t noticed, not with how much time they’ve been spending together. Stiles has never had to spell it out for anyone else. Derek knew, and was choosing to get out of town for the weekend.  
  
Stiles sits up, abrupt, and shakes himself out. It’s fine, Stiles reminds himself, harsh in his own head. He doesn’t need some stupidly handsome alpha around to help him through his heat. Stiles is 27 years old. He can and has done this on his own, and he’s proud of that. Fuck Derek.  
  
Stiles turns back to his computer, and very determinedly sets back to work. If his gut roils with disappointment and anxiety, if he feels let down and a little abandoned, well, that’s Stiles’ business to ignore.  
  
He spends Wednesday evening at the grocery store, stocks his freezer with microwave meals from Trader Joe’s. He changes his sheets, and calls Lydia to warn her he probably won’t make Sunday brunch this week.  
  
Stiles does not call Derek.  
  
He wants to, more than he’s willing to admit. But Derek has made his choice already, didn’t even dignify Stiles with a proper excuse. Stiles knows exactly what ‘family business’ means, because he’s pulled that shit himself. Instead, Stiles swings by Danny's tech company office on his way home.  
  
'Office' is kind of a misnomer - Danny and his three college buddies rent out the musty, echoingly empty space underneath a real-estate building to work on what Danny calls 'software development' and Stiles describes as 'IT shit', if only to piss him off. They haven't done much with the space other than put up some cheap metal desks and old filing cabinets, but as far as Stiles can tell, they pretty much all just hunker down over their computers and bitch at each other.  
  
Danny hardly looks happy to see him, but then, Danny never does. Stiles is ninety percent sure Danny only hangs out with him and Scott because Lydia tells him to, and everyone does what she says. Still, when Stiles says,  
  
"Hey, look, I need a favor," Danny just rolls his eyes and pulls Stiles into a back room. Stiles has heard it described as 'the conference room,' but he's pretty convinced its actually an unused storage closet. Danny doesn't shut the door, which seems like it defeats the point of pulling him out of the main office, but Stiles supposes the space would be damn claustrophobic if Danny had.  
  
“I’m in the middle of things,” Danny says, and Stiles reaches out to pat him on the chest.  
  
“It’s probably not urgent,” Stiles tells him. “I need you to reprogram my phone. I don’t want to be able to call - uh, a few numbers for the next few days.”  
  
“What the hell are you talking about,” Danny says.  
  
“You know, like those apps that restrict your calls when you’re drunk,” Stiles adds. “Like that. But for being in heat.”  
  
“That sounds like a story,” Danny remarks, but he doesn’t protest when Stiles shoves his phone into his hands. “You know, you could just block the phone number,” Danny adds.  
  
“Yes, but then I could just unblock it,” Stiles points out. “It’s not like I magically become incapable of using technology.”  
  
Which is true. Danny just shrugs and wanders off toward his computer, where barely two minutes of fussing is enough to reset Stiles’ phone. Danny turns and tosses it at Stiles.  
  
“I put Derek’s number on a five-day ban,” Danny says, and Stiles fumbles his phone.  
  
“That’s not who this is about,” Stiles says, in probably the least convincing lie to ever come out of his mouth. Danny rolls his eyes.  
  
“Whatever, Stiles. Get the hell out of here, I have real work to do.”  
  
“Thanks, Danny,” Stiles says, sheepish, and flees. 

————

Derek comes over without calling on Monday night, when Stiles is already in sweatpants and a faded tee shirt. It has been a truly exhausting day - the first day back at work after his heat always is, and this time his heat had hit him like a fucking freight train. To top it off, Stiles was assigned a new case this morning, and he has been trying to read through materials all evening to get up to date. He honestly thinks his eyeballs are going to fall out of his head.  
  
The knocking at the door goes on longer than it should before Stiles really notices it and shoves himself up and away from the table, strewn with printouts, and his laptop.  
  
“Coming, coming,” he hollers, and almost trips over a wrinkle in the carpet in his hurry to get the door. Stiles has to catch himself on the knob and he manages to fling the door open harder than he intended, off-balance until he sees Derek in the doorway. Stiles jerks upright. He’s not sure who he was expecting - Scott, maybe, or Lydia - but it sure as hell wasn’t Derek.  
  
“Hi,” Stiles says, mostly auto-pilot.  
  
Derek doesn’t actually reply, instead shoving a thin cardboard box into Stiles’ chest. He grabs at it without thinking, and when he looks down, it’s pizza. From Gjelina, apparently.  
  
Stiles bites his lip. “Look, Derek, I’m -”  
  
“I brought Star Wars,” Derek interrupts. “The original three. I thought you might. I don’t know. You look stressed.”  
  
“You couldn’t possibly have known that when you got pizza and movies,” Stiles says, and could roll his eyes at himself. Of course Derek knew. It’s the day after his heat: pretty much par for the course.  
  
“Call it a hunch,” Derek says.  
  
“Haven’t heard from you in a couple days,” Stiles adds, as casual as he can, and Derek just sort of - hunches in on himself.  
  
“I thought. Well. I went and visited my sister,” Derek says, and Stiles rolls his eyes. Sure. As if Derek hadn’t told him that the whole of the Hale family died, a decade and a half earlier. There’s no need to lie about it.  
  
But at the same time, Derek is standing right there in front of him and every line of Derek’s body writ into apology, and the very core of Stiles just wants to give it up and curl up next to Derek. To let himself be sore and tired with Derek’s hand on his body, and its been too long of a weekend for Stiles to muster back up the furious hurt that had induced him to block Derek from his phone on Wednesday.  
  
He shouldn’t let him in, Stiles tells himself, obstinately. Make Derek work for it a little more, or something.  
  
“Yeah, okay,” Stiles says, instead, and tugs the pizza out of Derek’s hands.  
  
They start with _A New Hope,_ and Stiles recites along with the opening titles dramatically enough that Derek almost chokes on his pizza. By the time Luke and Obi-Wan have made it to Mos Eisley, Stiles has somehow ended up horizontal on the couch with his head in Derek’s lap, and Derek’s fingers combing quietly through his hair. Stiles hadn’t even realized he’d had a headache until it was gone, smoothed away under Derek’s hands. 

————

“Part of the problem,” Stiles tells Lydia, “is that I’m getting over-invested. I don’t want to be invested.”  
  
“If you didn’t want to be invested, you wouldn’t be,” Lydia points out. “You don’t see me getting hung up on feelings and whether or not I should stick around for someone’s heat.”  
  
“That,” say Stiles, jabbing viciously at his oatmeal with his spoon, “is because you’re an alpha.”  
  
The oatmeal jiggles unpleasantly, and Stiles groans and pushes it away. They’re seated at a too-small table at the kind of indie, free-trade coffee shop that Stiles hates on principle. All of the baristas roll their eyes behind the counter at him when he asks for a shot of flavor in his latte, and all their baked goods are weird, prissy things with names he can’t pronounce. Oatmeal usually seems like the safest bet.  
  
“Don’t be an idiot,” Lydia tells him, sharply. “You and I both know you don’t believe that for a second.”  
  
“Fine, you’re just more emotionally mature. Better?” says Stiles, and Lydia raises an eyebrow at him as she takes a sip of her own coffee - a bitter dark roast she drinks black and that Stiles thinks would make his tongue curl up.  
  
“At least you’re not relying on corrosive popular stereotypes about sex and gender roles to justify your own inability to let go of your baggage and actually connect with someone,” she says, and Stiles winces.  
  
“Like a shot to the heart,” Stiles says. “Fuck. Here’s what I’m going to do, though. You’re going to set me up with one of your friends. Preferably one of the fashion ones, not your dorky math-y coworkers, but i’ll take what I can get. And then I’m going to go on silly meaningless dates so I can rub it in Derek’s face.”  
  
“This is exactly the opposite of healthy,” Lydia says, and Stiles shrugs.  
  
“You’re the one who’s always saying I’m an adult and just because you’re by default my alpha doesn’t mean you’re going to make my life choices for me,” Stiles says, and Lydia looks like she’s honestly considering shoving the abandoned oatmeal into his face.  
  
“Sometimes I wish we’d stuck with the dynamic we had in high school,” Lydia says. “When you had that ridiculous crush on me and I didn’t know your name.”  
  
“Good times,” Stiles says. “I’m gonna be late to work, text me later.”  
  
“Have a good day,” Lydia says, and Stiles grins at her, pushing back out of his chair and up. He doesn’t make it more than a step away when Lydia reaches out and grabs his wrist. When Stiles looks down at her, she’s biting her lip, and she looks earnest - it’s a strange expression to see on her face.  
  
“Stiles,” she says, “look, if you really want me to set you up with someone, I will. Just don’t do it because you think you have to, okay? I worry about you sometimes.”  
  
“Ladies and gentleman, I broke Lydia Martin,” Stiles announces, rather than pay any attention to the twist in his gut at her words. “She’s having emotions about another person, She’s worried, she says. It’s possible that she’s human after all.”  
  
“You’re an asshole,” Lydia tells him, but Stiles can read the hints of affection underneath the irritation, and he pats her hand.  
  
“That’s why you love me. Seriously, though, I’m going to be late. I’ll talk to you later.”  
  
“Bye,” Lydia says, and lets go. “Don’t forget that we’re doing dinner tomorrow. Danny swore to me that he won’t blow us off to stay late at work this time, so you better not either.”  
  
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Stiles says, and Lydia smiles at him as he leaves.  
  
If someone had told him back in high school, Stiles muses as he trudges toward the office, that one day, he’d have Lydia Martin worried over him, and dinner plans with Danny Mahealani, he’d’ve laughed his head off. First, because coffee, what the fuck, who the hell gives the ADD kid caffeine, but more relevantly because Stiles is pretty sure that in high school Lydia never actually knew his name and Danny hated his guts.  
  
The fall after they’d graduated from college, though, Stiles had left for UCLA’s law school and Scott had stayed in Beacon Hills. It had been big and scary and so hard, the way leaving home always is, until Stiles had stopped at a café before class and seen Lydia, tapping on her phone and tapping her foot impatiently. She won’t ever admit it but Stiles thinks that she’d been lonely too, newly returned to California for a PhD program, disconnected from her family as well as the pack she’d made for herself during her undergrad at University of Michigan.  
  
They’d fallen in together after that. Lydia reintroduced Stiles to Danny when he showed up in Los Angeles for some tech company. Stiles brought Scott in a few months later, when he found a position working for a veterinary clinic in Glendale. It had worked, somehow, Lydia’s alpha to Stiles’ omega, and Danny and Scott, their betas, falling somewhere in between.  
  
It’s like having their own pack, not based in family and parentage but just friendship. Stiles has adored Lydia since they were seven, thinks he might always adore her, but it’s different now. Better. She’s Stiles’ alpha if anyone is, and Stiles loves having her like this, wouldn’t want anything else - just Lydia, sassy and smart and his friend. 

————

Lydia texts him a few hours afterward with a name, a phone number, and the warning that there’s no way this won’t go terribly. Stiles knew that already, though, so he’s not too concerned. He texts the man instead, arranges for a quick drink after work because why draw this out?  
  
It’s the worst idea Stiles has ever had. That’s made obvious almost immediately, when he walks in and sees his date, charming and handsome and so obviously pleased to meet Stiles that Stiles wants to slap the smile off his face.  
  
“I’m Kyle,” he says, and holds his hand out to shake.  
  
“Yeah, no,” Stiles says, and turns on his heel and walks right back out.  
  
 _I hate him,_ he texts Lydia, hands shaking a little so that he has to try three times before autocorrect understands what Stiles is trying to write.  
  
 _I thought you’d like a beta. Something easy and safe,_ Lydia replies, almost immediately. Stiles isn’t sure if its a relief that she was waiting to hear what he thought, or if it makes him more furious.  
  
Stiles starts to type out his response, but almost immediately cancels out of the text and just calls Lydia.  
  
“I hate everything,” he snaps, and Lydia laughs, crackly over the line.  
  
“You’re the most emotionally illiterate individual I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. Just give it up and go back to Derek,” Lydia says, but it’s affectionate.  
  
Stiles groans, and Lydia groans right back, mocking.  
  
“I don’t care what you say, everything that boy has done says that all he wants is your love and affection. Stop getting in your own way.”  
  
“He ditched me the other week,” Stiles says, and hates the whine in his voice. “When I went into heat. If he really wants to be with me, he should have been all over that.”  
  
“Did you tell him you actually even wanted him around?” Lydia says.  
  
“What if he’d said no, though?” Stiles says, before he can really stop himself.  
  
There’s silence on the other end for a long moment, and Stiles seriously considers hanging up and pretending like this conversation never happened.  
  
“That’s life, buddy,” Lydia says finally. “It’s shitty and it hurts. There’s not much you can do about that.”  
  
“Tell me I’m not being ridiculous,” Stiles pleads, and he can practically see Lydia flipping her hair over her shoulder at him.  
  
“Of course you are, babes,” she says, but it’s kind. “We’re all ridiculous sometimes. I was ridiculous when Jackson left - you were the first to tell me that, as I recall. And Scott is constantly making a fool of himself over Allison. But refusing to admit you care because you’re afraid and you’ve gotten your heart broken before is just as ridiculous.”  
  
“If I go over there and he laughs at me and tells me to leave I’m firing you forever,” Stiles threatens.  
  
“If he does that, you’re coming straight over to my apartment and we’re going to get really drunk together,” Lydia corrects. “But I’ll feel really sorry for you. Go get ‘em, tiger.”  
  
It’s the final kick in the ass Stiles really needs, and he changes direction abruptly, pivoting on his heels fast enough that he almost smacks into someone trying to walk behind him.  
  
“Watch where you’re going, asshole,” the woman snaps, but Stiles ignores her. If he jogs part of the way, he can be to Derek’s apartment in twenty minutes.  
  
By the time the doorman is letting him into the elevator, Stiles is realizing that he has absolutely no idea if Derek is actually home. It’s seven o’clock on a Tuesday but Derek doesn’t exactly work nine-to-five hours. For all he knows, Derek could be at work still. Or out with friends. Or, and at this one Stiles’ stomach twists into a knot, he could be out with someone else. Derek is kind of a catch, Stiles reminds himself, and they never actually said that they weren’t seeing other people even if they’ve been acting that way. Stiles was out with someone else earlier.  
  
It doesn’t take Stiles long to get himself all worked up thinking along those lines, and almost without intending to, he finds himself pounding on Derek’s door with a balled-up fist. He wants Derek to pay attention even if he’s with some young hot piece of ass, after all, and so when Derek opens the door, casual in jeans and a polo, Stiles just kind of - launches himself at Derek.  
  
Derek doesn’t seem to have any complaints about the program Stiles has set, and, after a moment’s startled flailing, wraps his arms around Stiles and walks them both backward, pushing the door shut with his foot. He tastes like he hasn’t brushed his teeth all day and Stiles doesn’t even care, not when Derek sucks Stiles’ tongue into his mouth like that and they almost trip over Derek’s couch.  
  
“I just wanted to say,” Stiles says, when they bounce apart at the impact, “I really like you. Okay?”  
  
“Yeah. Okay,” Derek mutters, and drags Stiles down onto the couch on top of him.  
  
Stiles is working industriously on getting Derek’s belt undone and pants off when he hears a very pointed cough, somewhere overhead. He freezes, mouth still pressed to Derek’s pulse point.  
  
“Was that you,” he mutters, muffled into Derek’s throat. Derek doesn’t answer, but this close, Stiles can feel his heart rate ratcheting up, an anxious thrum against Stiles’ mouth.  
  
Well, shit.  
  
Stiles straightens and turns to peer over his shoulder, not bothering to actually get up off of Derek. There’s a woman in the doorway, tall and elegant and so clearly an alpha that something at the very core of Stiles wants to bare his throat to her.  
  
“So, I’m guessing you’re not going to be ready to go in ten, then,” she says, and it’s so obvious that she’s talking to Derek and only Derek, like Stiles isn’t even there, that Stiles thinks he could actually melt into the floor out of embarrassment.  
  
Well, it’s too late now to sprint out the door, especially since he’s not one hundred percent sure where his shirt is.  
  
“Hi. I’m Stiles,” he says, and pushes himself upright to stick a hand out at the woman. She just raises an eyebrow, and Stiles very slowly withdraws his arm, tucking his hands into his armpits when he can’t think of anything better to do with them.  
  
“I’m Derek’s sister. Laura,” the woman says eventually, so coldly that Stiles thinks its a miracle he hasn’t dropped dead where he’s sitting. “He and I have dinner plans.”  
  
“Sorry. Sorry,” Stiles mutters, and scans the room frantically for his shirt. He desperately feels the need to be clothed, right now.  
  
Derek, for his part, still has not said a fucking word, still lying sprawled out on the couch like a goddamn greek statue.  
  
“His fault, not yours,” Laura says, smoothly. “Derek, if you can manage to get yourself upright and decent, I’d appreciate it, our reservation is in ten minutes.”  
  
“I’m going to -- leave,” Stiles says. His shirt is clearly a lost cause. It fought a brave battle, but casualties are sustained in every war. “I will - yeah. Nice to meet you, Laura.”  
  
“It’s mutual,” says Laura, and pauses, which is enough time for Stiles to edge very, very quickly toward the door, before adding, “I’m sure we can have dinner together another time. Tomorrow, maybe.”  
  
Stiles freezes, and on the couch, Derek inhales sharply.  
  
“Laura--”  
  
“Great,” Laura says, sharp. “Stiles, meet us in the lobby tomorrow at - shall we say seven?”  
  
“Seven,” Stiles says, feebly, and crashes out the door before this gets any more horrifyingly, terribly embarrassing. The doorman looks at him like he’s insane, which, fair enough, Stiles is still shirtless. 

————

It takes a solid five minutes running down the sidewalk at breakneck speed before the realization of how fucking terrible that actually was crashes into Stiles like a physical blow, and he has to stop and lean against the wall of a building and catch his breath. He’s on the edge of a panic attack, Stiles realizes, very distantly, and has to sit down, shirtless in his work pants on the sidewalk, and concentrate very hard on breathing for a minute.  
  
His goddamn sister. Stiles would have bet money that the sister Derek has mentioned was a fiction. He's been killing himself for days over Derek's supposedly fiction trip to visit her, and for a brief, relieved second, Stiles thinks that this means that all the bullshit he's been running through his head about Derek's lack of serious interest is only about Stiles' own baggage.  
  
But Derek's has never mentioned Laura, besides the single time he used her as an excuse to leave town. He'd certainly never mentioned that she was in San Francisco.  
  
Stiles doesn't know what to think.  
  
Laura didn’t seem to have any idea who Stiles was, either, and that realization is enough to keep Stiles on the ground for another ten minutes, practically hiccuping as he tries to get himself under control. This is why he’s supposed to carry anti-anxiety medications with him, even if he hardly even uses them, why is he such a fucking idiot?  
  
But berating himself only makes it worse, and finally, Stiles manages to fumble his phone out and text Scott. It’s practically incoherent, full of misplaced words and typos so bad that even Siri couldn’t fix them, but Scott’s _just come over_ in response is enough that Stiles can lean back and just think about his breathing exercises.  
  
Eventually, Stiles manages to stand and wave down a taxi. It doesn’t occur to him until he’s in the car and the meter is running that he’s not even sure if he has his wallet, but desperately groping at his own ass confirms that he at least managed to hold onto that.  
  
Finally, finally, Stiles manages to get into Scott’s apartment. Stiles recognizes vaguely that he looks like a fucking vagabond, bursting through Scott’s door without a shirt, but it’s Scott’s reaction that really confirms that fact.  
  
“Did you get mugged?” Scott yelps, shooting up from his place on his ratty couch like he’s been shot in the ass.  
  
“Worse,” Stiles says, and steps forward until he can rest his head on Scott’s shoulder and spill out the whole pathetic story. 

————

_Sorry about that,_ comes the text, about twenty minutes later, when Stiles is hunched over on Scott’s couch, wearing a borrowed Batman tee over his charcoal trousers, now appallingly wrinkled and probably smelling of sidewalk.  
  
 _No worries,_ Stiles types, even though that's exactly the opposite of true.  
  
“Is that him?” asks Scott, and Stiles makes a face. Scott just laughs at him, tosses an x-box controller and an open bag of m &ms. “Put the phone away and don’t think about it,” Scott advises.  
  
Stiles catches the controller and misses the m&ms, which go skittering across the floor in the most appalling waste Stiles has seen in a long time. Scott just shrugs and scoops up the closest three, popping them into his mouth.  
  
“I vacuumed like three weeks ago,” he tells Stiles, like this is something to be proud of. Stiles laughs at him and toggles their game on, relieved beyond belief to be safely ensconced with Scott and his accidentally soothing presence.  
  
Except not, because about an hour later, Derek’s name shows up on his caller id. Scott eyes him skeptically, but Stiles stands up anyway, walks to the kitchen for some semblance of privacy as he answers.  
  
On the other end, Derek sounds out of breath.  
  
“Sorry about that,” he says. “I swear, I didn’t know she was coming, I thought our reservation was for tomorrow, I wouldn’t have made you meet -- look, don’t feel like you have to do anything you don’t want to do --”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Stiles says, because he can’t stand listening to Derek babble like an idiot like this. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard Derek sound this distressed. “I have other plans, anyway. Have fun with your sister.”  
  
There’s a pause on the other line.  
  
“Okay. Right, yeah that’s - okay,” Derek says, finally, and he sounds really strange now. Stiles can’t quite pick out why, and when he finds himself trying, pinches himself hard on the hip, a wakeup call. Derek isn’t his mate. It’s not Stiles’ job to pick out Derek’s emotions and make him feel better or some bullshit like that.  
  
“Cool. See y’later,” Stiles says, and hangs up without waiting for a reply. Scott's silence from the other room is suspicious, but Stiles takes a second to lean his forehead against the kitchen wall, trying just to focus on the coolness of the plaster against his skin.  
  
He's still leaning against the wall when Scott pads his way in, every inch of him exuding anxious sympathy, and Stiles closes his eyes against it.  
  
"You okay?" Scott asks, and Stiles forces himself back upright.  
  
"I'll survive," Stiles says. "I need a beer."  
  
“You need more than beer," Scott advises. There's a half-full bottle of cheap whiskey perched on top of the fridge next to half a dozen assorted liquors, and Scott grabs for it before pulling open the refrigerator door and passing Stiles two cans of bud light.  
  
"Classy," Stiles remarks, but Scott just slings an arm over Stiles' shoulders and steers him back into the den.  
  
They pass the bottle back and forth for a while after that, chasing the burn of the whiskey with cheap beer even though the combination makes Stiles gag for the first few swigs. There’s some hockey game on, and Stiles pretends to watch it even though he has never cared enough about hockey to actually understood the rules.  
  
“I bet he comes from some, like, really traditional family,” Scott says, eventually. They’re both on their third beer and the whiskey’s gone. At some point, the room went all fuzzy at the edge of Stiles’ vision. “Y’know, one where they expect their kids to find some omega to mate and breed and keep in the family compound. Or whatever. One of the old packs.”  
  
“Right?” Stiles exclaims, and points a finger at Scott. “The worst kind! I’m his, his rebellion! I’m the teenage bad choice he never made.”  
  
“Exactly,” Scott says. “That’s ‘xactly what I was saying.” He pauses and frowns at Stiles. “I’m sorry he didn’t want you to come to dinner.”  
  
“Yeah,” Stiles sighs. “It’s okay.”  
  
But because Scott is the best, he reaches out and pulls Stiles over, so that they’re sitting snugly side-by-side. Scott slings his arm over Stiles’ shoulder, so that Stiles can rest his head on Scott’s shoulder.  
  
“I don’t even like him, really,” Stiles says, and he says it convincingly enough that he can almost believe it. 

————

Stiles builds an extra ten minutes into his commute to work every morning to stop at the Starbucks across the street from his office building. His co-workers make fun of him for coming in every day with a grande paper cup filled with the sticky-sweet, over-priced concoctions Starbucks is infamous for. He’s been reminded repeatedly that there’s a coffee machine at the office and he has really no reason at all to pay out the nose for bad coffee, and Stiles couldn’t care less. He likes what he likes, and Stiles worked really hard to get one of the ever-fewer jobs as a well-paid associate in a large, successful law firm. He feels that not only can he afford to buy a cup of sugary, burnt espresso without having to justify it to his co-workers, he might even deserve it.  
  
Stiles queues up blearily in front of the counter, where three women, betas all, are industriously providing stimulants and full-fat pastries to what appears to be the entire working population of the whole block. He almost jumps out of his skin when someone says his name, very quietly, and touches his shoulder.  
  
Stiles spins around, knocking into the people on either side of him and almost whacks Laura in the nose.  
  
“Jesus Christ!”  
  
“Sorry,” she says, and doesn’t look it. “We heard we were going to miss you at dinner tonight! So glad we ran into you here.”  
  
“We?’ Stiles says, warily, and looks around for Derek. Honestly, if he has to deal with both of them this morning, he might slit his wrists.  
  
It’s possible he’s a little hungover. A lot hungover. Either way, it’s Scott’s fault. Or Derek’s fault, Stiles can’t decide if the enabler is at fault or the cause.  
  
“Yes, me and Isaac, my mate. He has a table in the back, if you’d like to join us?”  
  
He doesn’t. He really, really does not want to do that.  
  
“I’d love to,” Stiles says, “But I really have to get-”  
  
“Lovely,” Laura says, cutting him off midstream, clasps him lightly by the wrist.  
  
Everything about her makes Stiles want to curl up in a ball, and maybe expose his belly to her if it means she’ll leave him alone. He has to actively work to keep himself from whining in the back of his throat. When she tugs on him, Stiles just follows, shoulders hunched. With her fingers laid out on the top of his wrist, Stiles can see that her nails are painted and tipped with white. They are, like everything else about her, intimidating. He fucking hates alphas. Fucking Derek.  
  
“The barista told us what you like,” she says. “A bit over the top for my taste, but, well, we never can account for taste, can we?”  
  
It couldn’t be more of a jab if she’d actually looked at Stiles and just flat out said she didn’t like him. Her tone and the way she holds his wrist like she can’t wait to stop touching his dirty skin make Stiles want to either throw up or just lay down and ask what he can do to make her happy. It’s infuriating and demeaning, and the wash of hate that Stiles feels is all that keeps him on his feet long enough for Laura to steer him to one of the small tables in the back. They’re mostly unoccupied - customers this early tend to take their drinks to go - and one table has a fair, curly-haired man sitting with his back to them, an extra chair liberated from another table.  
  
Isaac is _exactly_ what Stiles expected.  
  
He is tall, taller than Stiles maybe, and the curve of a muscled shoulder is apparent under his lightweight tee. Even so, he looks hunched and small at the table, like he doesn’t deserve to fill the proper amount of space in the world. Isaac doesn’t make eye contact with Stiles when Laura pushes him down into one of the chairs, just says,  
  
“Yours,” and pushes a tall paper cup at Stiles, eyes fixed on the table top.  
  
It’s a large - Stiles never gets anything bigger than a medium for himself, because too much caffeine sets his ADHD off pretty aggressively. He takes a sip - it’s not like he’s planning on staying long enough to finish, anyway - and is, indeed, exactly how he likes it.  
  
“You must be Isaac, then,” he says, after a long pause in which exactly no effort is made to introduce them. “I’m Stiles. Obviously.”  
  
“Yeah,” Isaac says, and doesn’t look up from the table. It takes Stiles a supreme force of will to keep himself from rolling his eyes. He hates omegas like this, who seem like they’d faint at the smallest hint of a social interaction and don’t make a single move without the approval of their alpha. Isaac is everything Stiles has worked so hard to prove omegas are not, to keep himself from becoming. It makes Stiles want to be purposefully rude even while Laura’s presence makes him want to act exactly like Isaac.  
  
“So,” he says briskly, instead of making a cutting comment about Isaac’s hair, because he is better than that and he refuses to be brought down to the level of petty infighting and also, Laura’s hand is on his shoulder, “what can I do for you two?”  
  
Finally, _finally,_ Laura lifts her hand and sinks down into a chair. She [smiles between the two of them,](http://paintaire.tumblr.com/post/70161910187/teen-wolf-big-bang-entry-punch-drunk-on) and Stiles could swear her teeth look too sharp.  
  
 _Don’t be such a paranoid freak,_ he tells himself, sharply, and takes another sip of his coffee.  
  
“We just wanted the chance to meet you,” Laura chirps. “Since you cancelled on us for tonight.”  
  
“I told Derek I had plans,” Stiles says, sharply.  
  
“Yes,” Laura murmurs, “Other plans.”  
  
Her nails are tapping lightly on the plastic tabletop. Stiles very fervently wishes he were brash enough to reach out and still her hand.  
  
“That’s what I said.”  
  
“Who with?” Laura asks, and Stiles raises an eyebrow at her, refuses to respond.  
  
Isaac snorts, and sneers at Stiles. It’s the first time he’s lifted his gaze from the table. “Just answer the question, Stilinski,” he says, and his tone shocks Stiles. He didn’t think Isaac had it in him to be biting.  
  
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Stiles says, and pushes himself up away from the table. He’s an adult, and he’s not putting up with this shit. “I have to go. Thanks for the coffee.”  
  
He walks away without looking back and without taking the cup, and hides how badly his hands are shaking by shoving them into his pockets. He’s going to kill Derek for this. 

————

The day is pretty much shot, after that.  
  
Stiles tries really, really hard to pull himself together, after he gets to the office. It’s - difficult, to shake off such a blatant confrontation with an assertive alpha like Laura. It’s left him feeling shaky.  
  
Which it shouldn’t, he reminds himself firmly. She’s not his alpha. Stiles doesn’t kowtow to anyone, especially not to some power-tripping alpha who thinks she has the right to follow him into his coffee shop and buy his coffee like she owns him. Stiles refuses to let himself be pushed around by any alpha who sees him. He’s better than that, and so instead of dwelling on it, Stiles tries to drown himself in reading through depositions and old court briefs, making notes on a lined pad of paper. Every page, though, takes him three times as long as it should, and when he glances back over his notes, he can’t figure out what the hell they’re supposed to say.  
  
He hates that Laura could do this to him.  
  
Stiles makes it through the rest of the workday mostly by dint of looking industrious and letting his superiors assume that means he’s actually being productive. His four o’clock conference call is actually a twenty-minute bitchfest to Scott, who does an admirable job of dedicating his commute home to being appropriately sympathetic and appalled.  
  
“It sounds like she thought she needed to vet you,” Scott says at one point, and Stiles rolls his eyes.  
  
“Which is stupid,” he says, and can practically see Scott’s one-shouldered shrug.  
  
“I dunno,” Scott says. “You guys have been dating for like three months.”  
  
“We have not,” Stiles snaps. “He’s made that perfectly clear. And even if we were, that hardly excuses here fucking following me to work. You don’t see me stalking my siblings’ significant others! Because it’s not acceptable behavior!”  
  
“You’re an only child,” Scott points out.  
  
If Stiles wasn’t pretending to be on a conference call he’d thump his head on the table. “Fine, Scott. Fine. Yes, I’m an only child, but that’s not the point.”  
  
“I’m not trying to make excuses for her,” Scott says. “I just think - I don’t know. Derek’s probably talked to her about you. And if he’s half as twisted up about this whole relationship as you are, then it’d make sense if she was kind of concerned. And she did invite you to dinner, which is pretty normal.”  
  
“Derek didn’t want me to come!”  
  
“No, you told him you didn’t want to go,” Scott corrects. “I heard you talking to him, you can’t lie about this one.”  
  
“Right, because we’re not dating, and he didn’t want me there.”  
  
“I dunno,” Scott says, “I mean, I know I’ve only met the guy, like, twice, and one of those times you were both naked, but it sure sounds to me like the only reason you two aren’t dating is because you keep telling him you don’t want to. Don’t get me wrong, you’re entitled to do whatever you want, but have you ever actually asked Derek what he wants?”  
  
“Are you projecting right now?” Stiles asks suspiciously. “This sounds like an Allison story.”  
  
“I dunno, dude,” Scott sighs. “I can’t even keep it all straight. Maybe you’re right. Maybe she is just a nutcase.”  
  
“And a complete power hungry bitch,” Stiles adds. “Harrison is giving me weird looks, but I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for letting me take up your whole commute home.”  
  
“Yeah, bro, love you too. Are we still doing brunch on Saturday?”  
  
“I have no idea,” Stiles says, “Text Lydia and let me know,” and hangs up. When he looks at the clock, it’s only four-thirty, and Stiles thinks, very briefly but very seriously, about faking appendicitis and just leaving. Instead, he texts Derek.  
  
 _Are you working tonight? Can I come over?_

————

Stiles arranges himself very carefully outside of Derek’s door before he knocks, aiming for casual and pissed as he leans himself against the frame. Knowing his luck, he’s probably rocking more of a constipated bear face, but whatever, a constipated bear probably looks pretty pissed, in general.  
  
“It was unlocked, you could have just come in,” Derek says, as he opens the door, and smiles at Stiles like he’s actually happy to see him.  
  
Stiles rolls his eyes and pushes past Derek, rude and glad of it. He’s spoiling for a fight, and he wants Derek to know that.  
  
“So, I talked to Laura today,” he says, fake casual, and the sudden silence behind him is telling.  
  
“Did you?” Derek says, cautiously.  
  
“Yeah,” Stiles says and turns to face Derek, arms crossed. “What the fuck is her damage, Derek? She stalked me to my coffee shop, I felt like I was being targeted by the mafia or something.”  
  
“Shit,” Derek says, rubbing both hands over his face. “Shit, Stiles, I’m sorry, she promised me she wouldn’t, I thought she meant it-”  
  
“You knew!?” Stiles explodes, and makes a very serious effort to moderate his volume to something resembling an indoor voice. “What the fuck, Derek! No, seriously, explain to me please what the hell is going on here, because I have no fucking clue and having crazy alphas stalk me to my place of employment is so far outside of the boundaries of okay that I don’t even know how to process this!”  
  
“I know,” Derek says. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair to you.”  
  
“Damn straight it wasn’t fair!”  
  
“I’d explain for you if I could,” Derek continues, quiet. His hands are open toward Stiles, his wrists offered up and out, and it’s a submissive enough gesture that it makes Stiles uncomfortable. “I’ll talk to her. What Laura did wasn’t okay, whether or not she actually set out to scare you. I hope - I can’t change Laura, but I hope you won’t hold my family against me.”  
  
“She didn’t scare me,” Stiles mutters, even though it’s a blatant lie and they both know it. Derek nods agreeably.  
  
“Still,” he says. “I’m sorry.”  
  
And Stiles doesn’t really know what to do with that. He’d wanted a fight, the opportunity to yell and scream and get really, genuinely angry. If he’s really honest, Stiles wanted the chance to tell Derek off in the way he wishes he could scold Laura. He’d wanted Derek to fight back.  
  
“I’m really angry,” Stiles says, finally. “I hate it when alphas try and push me around like that. When anyone does.”  
  
Derek nods again.  
  
“I promise you, Stiles, I don’t know. If I had, I would have stopped her.”  
  
Stiles grimaces, feeling drained and frustrated and, a little inexplicably, sad.  
  
“If we all got the chance to choose our families, I’d be endowed,” he says eventually. “And I’d have a name normal people could pronounce. What can you do, I guess.”  
  
Derek smiles at him, small and a little shy, and reaches out to pull Stiles into his chest. It’s only then that Stiles actually exhales, one full long breath, and realizes just how tense he’d been. When he breathes in again, all he can smell is Derek.  
  
“You hungry?” Derek says. “I can order Chinese.”  
  
“Don’t you have dinner with Laura?” Stiles says, muffled against Derek’s shoulder so that his whole torso moves when Derek shrugs.  
  
“I’ll cancel.”  
  
“Yeah, okay,” Stiles sighs. “There better be fortune cookies, though, or I’m gonna have to shank someone.”  
  
They eat sweet ‘n sour chicken and kung pao beef right out of the containers, standing at Derek’s counter with the cheap wooden chopsticks the restaurant provided and jostling each other for the best pieces of chicken. Derek eats all the water chestnuts when Stiles isn’t looking, because he’s an asshole, and Stiles pours soy sauce all over the chicken in revenge, cackling when Derek squawks about sodium levels.  
  
“Come visit us at www.evergreenrestaurant.com," Stiles reads, when he cracks open his fortune cookie. “What the fuck, that’s the worst fortune ever! I don’t think that even counts!”  
  
Derek laughs and pulls the fortune out of Stiles’ hand to read it for himself.  
  
“Yeah, that’s kind of bogus,” he admits, and pulls open a drawer to dig through and find a pen, scratching out the printed advertisement.  
  
“What are you writing on it?” Stiles demands, and pinches Derek in the side when he covers the scrap of paper with his arm so Stiles can’t read it.  
  
“Ow! Let me finish!” Derek exclaims, and Stiles scoffs.  
  
“Whatever, I barely even caught skin, don’t be a pussy. What’d you write?”  
  
Derek winks as he slides the fortune across the counter. “It’s pretty heartfelt,” he confesses.  
  
“You is kind, you is smart, you is important,” Stiles reads, and then smacks Derek’s shoulder. “Way to be creative! Seriously, _The Help?_ are you secretly a woman? I mean, I can work with that but I feel like you should have told me. Open and honest, dude, open and honest.”  
  
“Whatever, I watched it with you,” Derek grumbles, but he’s smiling, like he can’t help himself, and it makes Stiles go soft and achey, somewhere behind his ribcage. He doesn’t know what to do with that, so he wraps his hand around the back of Derek’s neck and pulls him in, kissing him deep and slow and dirty.  
  
“You wanna fuck me or what, Mr. Kathryn Stockett,” he says, against Derek’s mouth, and even though that comment probably should have killed the mood completely, Derek just presses up into Stiles, biting at his lip until Stiles is shaking with it, and Derek backs them toward the bedroom, undoing the buttons on Stiles’ shirt as they go.  
  
“My god you’re beautiful,” Derek murmurs, pushing Stiles down onto his bed and kissing along his neck, his jawline, as Stiles tips his head back and moans under Derek’s hands.  
  
They don’t waste time tonight like they sometimes do, Derek teasing Stiles with his mouth and his hands until Stiles begs, or Stiles getting sassy and obnoxious underneath Derek. Instead, they are both quiet, and Derek’s hands rove down Stiles’ sides as he sinks into Stiles with a small gasp, mapping Stiles’ skin with his palms. Even then, Derek is soft with him, careful, like Stiles is something fragile and precious, and Stiles reaches up to touch his face, to trace the lines of Derek’s cheekbones, Derek’s eyes dark above him.  
  
“Fuck,” Stiles gasps, “Derek, yes, harder, please,” so that Derek will press him into the bed, sweaty bodies sticking together in all the best ways. 

————

They lie together afterward, pressed back to chest with Derek’s arm draped over Stiles and his head tucked in against the back of Stiles’ neck. He falls asleep quickly, breath deepening and slowing into half-snores, but Stiles is wide awake, staring out at the wall.  
  
 _He never really got any answers,_ Stiles remembers. Derek had apologized and cancelled on his sister, and earlier in the evening that had seemed like enough. Derek had wanted to spend time with Stiles over Laura, and that had seemed important, but now, lying in the dark with Derek’s body all along his, Stiles still doesn’t know what Derek has told Laura, or what she thinks of him. This is the problem with never really talking about feelings, Stiles tells himself, over and over and over again until his breath is coming too fast and he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek without quite being able to stop.  
  
He feels vulnerable, lying in bed with Derek, like he’s been split open and can’t quite figure out how to pull the parts back together. It’s too much. Stiles doesn’t know how to deal with this, and he doesn’t want to feel this much, and he slides out from Derek’s grasp, only making it as far as the bathroom before he has to sit down.  
  
Before yesterday, Stiles hasn’t had a full-blown panic attack in years. He’s got a prescription for a generic lorazepam, even if he forgets to carry it, and a whole host of stress management techniques. For the most part, he has his anxiety under control. Still, he’s a fucking idiot for not putting his pills in his back pocket after his near miss yesterday. Swearing at himself, though, hardly helps. Stiles tries to focus on creating an awareness of relaxation in his shaking hands, but panic keeps rising up his chest and into his throat until he’s choking on it.  
  
He doesn’t know what he’s doing here, he keeps thinking, over and over, he’s fucking up and he doesn’t know how to fix it. He’s in over his head, and Stiles can’t quite figure out how to get back to treading water. He can’t do this. He can’t be here, with Derek sleeping in the other room and he thinks he might be dying.  
  
It lasts forever and for no time at all, and when Stiles comes back to himself, he’s freezing cold and still shaking. It’s ridiculous, he tells himself, to be naked on the bathroom floor, because he is not a bad breakup song, and the thought is enough to propel Stiles up off the tiles, even when he thinks for a hysterical second that he might fall right back down.  
  
He doesn’t bother trying to find his own clothes, just steals a pair of Derek’s sweatpants and a tee shirt from his bureau, and slips out of the bedroom. The remains of dinner are still on the kitchen counter, and another day, Stiles might have tidied up, so Derek didn’t wake up to stale egg rolls. Tonight, though, he just grabs his phone and leaves, locking the door behind him.  
  
And then Stiles goes home. He has to go somewhere, after all, even if going to his apartment feels a little bit like the most anti-climactic destination. The only other option Stiles can think of is a liquor store, and he’s pretty sure those aren’t open at this ungodly hour.  
  
It’s barely four in the morning but San Francisco is beginning to rouse, and Stiles passes other people on the street. Everyone is harried, too busy to even look sideways at Stiles shivering in the early morning chill. They look, above all, busy, and Stiles envies their distraction for a moment before remembering that he, too, is gainfully employed and there’s really no reason to go home and fester in his own head when he can go to work.  
  
And so Stiles goes home and puts on a suit. He packs a lunch. It’s only a few hard-boiled eggs and some bread, but it makes him feel a little bit more like a responsible adult.  
  
There’s no one in the office when Stiles swipes himself in with his keycard. The phone at the receptionist’s desk rings almost immediately, which was expected.  
  
“This is Anne with Griffin Security, calling to check in on the door alarm,” says a perky female voice, when Stiles lifts up the receiver.  
  
“Yeah, hi, thanks for calling,” Stiles says. “Sorry to have set it off, I had to come in earlier than I expected.”  
  
“No problem,” says Anne. “Can I just get your employee code to confirm that?”  
  
Stiles reads the string of numbers printed on his fob, and can hear Anne clicking away for a second through the earpiece.  
  
“You’re all set,” she says. “Have a lovely day.”  
  
“Doubtful,” Stiles mutters, but Anne has already hung up.  
  
With no other pending distractions, Stiles flicks on a few of the hall lights and wanders off down toward his desk. Now that he’s actually here, in the office, coming to work seems like it was a bad idea. The dark rooms and powered-down computers give the building an air of abandonment, a feeling that resonates far too easily with Stiles’ own emotional state. Because he is a child of the twenty-first century, he pulls out his cell phone and pages restlessly through the apps with no real goal other than somehow distracting himself. Unsurprisingly, his Instagram feed is mostly dead and the only people posting on Twitter are foreigners or news sources. Stiles opens and closes the email app three times before he realizes he’s just standing in front of his desk, looking at the same correspondence he had yesterday.  
  
“You’re being ridiculous,” Stiles tells himself, as firm as he can manage, and slips his phone into a desk drawer where it’s out of sight, and, hopefully, out of mind. His chair is black faux leather and Stiles, as usual, almost slips off when he collapses into it. He spins in it a few times, back and forth. There’s no one to make fun of him for doing so, after all.  
  
There’s a sticky-note posted to the top of the desk, and scribbled out on it is a list of mundane tasks Stiles has to remember to do when he’s not busy with something else. This seems like as good a time as any to start slogging through it. He can’t think of anything more mind-numbing than reading the latest draft of Harris’ pending law review article, and so Stiles crosses off _harris thingy to read_ and pulls up the pdf on his screen. Five minutes in, Stiles is wishing he hadn’t been so optimistic as to cross it out before actually finishing, but, well, it’s off the list now, and so he pushes through. The article is technical and poorly written, and before Stiles quite realizes, he’s got fifteen ‘comments’ typed into the yellow text boxes Adobe Reader provides and it’s five-forty. He’s been here for an hour already.  
  
Stiles is very briefly proud of himself, until he pulls his phone out of the drawer and sees the three missed calls from Derek and corresponding voicemails. He’s a coward, he knows, but Stiles deletes the voicemails without listening to any of them, and powers the phone off. 

————

Sometime around seven o’clock, the executive assistant arrives, heralded by lights flickering on throughout the office. Maryann doesn’t say anything to Stiles outside of a cursory greeting, which Stiles appreciates. Harris stomps in about a half hour afterward, and Stiles wastes no time in trooping into Harris’ office with a print-out of the article and Stiles’ comments.  
  
“I read your draft!” Stiles says, over-cheerful and loud because it annoys Harris. True to form, Harris looks briefly pained.  
  
“It wasn’t meant to be a draft,” he says. “I’m submitting tomorrow.”  
  
“You have some inconsistencies, and the whole sixth page should go further toward the end,” Stiles says. He drops into the chair opposite Harris’ desk without waiting for an invitation. Harris, already looking exhausted from under a minute in Stiles’ company, groans and holds out a hand for the printout.  
  
Stiles emerges some time later, much cheered by nearly an hour spent giving Harris grief. That lasts for exactly two seconds, not coincidentally the amount of time it takes for him to notice Derek, perched on the fashionably small couch near Maryann’s desk. He’s hunched in over himself, somehow making himself small despite the breadth of his shoulders and bulk of every angle. The sadness written in the lines of his body makes Stiles’ gut wrench.  
  
“You have a visitor,” Maryann tells Stiles, and to her left, Derek looks up.  
  
“Hey,” Stiles says, weakly, as he glances around for some kind of escape. He’d expected anger, and that, Stiles knows how to handle. He had imagined the kind of knock-down drag-out screaming match that ends in everyone in the vicinity being written up for a domestic infraction. Stiles has done that before, and knows how it ends - he and Derek never speaking to each other again.  
  
He hadn’t prepared himself for the disappointment in Derek’s eyes.  
  
“I was worried about you,” Derek says quietly. Stiles winces visibly.  
  
“Do you wanna - step outside?” he offers, and Derek shrugs.  
  
“If you want,” Derek says, and follows Stiles out past Maryanne’s desk and through the front doors of the office suite.  
  
“Sorry about this morning,” Stiles says, tossing it casually over his shoulder as he leads Derek back away from the glass doors of the office and around a corner, where Maryann can’t see them. He’s going to be the subject of office gossip as it is, the last thing he needs is for everyone to see him get dumped.  
  
“I’ve been trying to call you since five-thirty,” says Derek.  
  
“My phone died,” Stiles tells him, with a broad smile. “I had to come into work early.”  
  
“Don’t lie to me, Stiles,” Derek says, and looks straight into Stiles’ eyes. “I deserve better than that.”  
  
Stiles bites his lip, and glances away. “I’m an asshole,” he tells the wall. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“If you don’t want to do - this, anymore, I can deal with that,” Derek says, gesturing at the space between them. “But you have to tell me what you want. I can’t read your mind, Stiles. And - if this is about Laura, I told you, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say about her.”  
  
And that - that’s hard for Stiles to swallow.  
  
“You could have started by telling me she even existed,” Stiles snaps, head jerking up. “That would have been a good place to start.”  
  
“I did,” Derek protests. “I’ve mentioned her a dozen times. What the hell, Stiles, I went to visit her.”  
  
“You told me your family was dead,” Stiles corrects. “Forever ago. And it’s not like she knew who I was, either!”  
  
Derek throws his hands in the air, finally beginning to look exasperated.  
  
“I’ve visited her three or four times since we started dating,” Derek says. “I talk to her all the time. Of course she knows who you are, Stiles!”  
  
“You told me you were going to visit a sister I didn’t know existed exactly once,” Stiles corrects, “and you made that seem an awful lot like you were just trying to -“  
  
He cuts himself off, crossing his arms and looking away. He can still see Derek in his peripheral vision, who hesitates before taking a small step forward to touch Stiles’ arm. Stiles is torn between wanting to shrug out of the contact or lean into it.  
  
“Trying to what, Stiles?” Derek asks.  
  
“I don’t know,” Stiles mutters. _It doesn’t matter,_ he almost says, but Lydia is in the back of his head, reminding him that he only gets one chance at this. That he can’t let his own need to protect himself get in the way here.  
  
It may be Lydia’s voice in his head but right here it’s just him and Derek, and Stiles has to force himself to turn back to Derek, for once in his life to not take the easy way out.  
  
“It seemed an awful lot like you didn’t want to be with me,” Stiles says, looking straight at Derek, and once he starts it is suddenly easier to go on. “Coming into my heat, I mean, since you left and didn’t come back until after I was through it. I thought you were making up a sister so you had an excuse to leave.”  
  
Stiles wants to keep going, but Derek looks stricken, and he’s shaking his head.  
  
“I didn’t want to pressure you,” Derek says, words spilling out. “You didn’t say anything, and I thought you didn’t want me to be there. I would have asked, but - Stiles, you’re so in charge. You never need help from anyone. I was afraid you’d say no if I asked. I thought that - if you had wanted me there, you’d have said.”  
  
“I didn’t think I needed to,” Stiles says, a little stunned. But it his stomach is starting to unclench, for what feels like the first time since Derek told him he was leaving town a week ago.  
  
Derek exhales in this weird, audibly uneven breath, halfway between a laugh and a sob, and reaches out to pull Stiles into him. Stiles goes, willing, and they stand like that for a minute, wrapped around each other.  
  
“I tried to go on a date with someone else on Tuesday,” Stiles says, muffled into Derek’s neck. “It was terrible. I hated him. I didn’t even sit down.”  
  
Derek laughs a little, though he sounds more relieved than amused. “Laura told me I’m the worst alpha she’s ever met. Isaac did, too.”  
  
“Yeah, well, everyone in my life thinks I’m an emotionally constipated idiot, so there’s that,” Stiles says.  
  
“I should have told you about Laura before,” Derek continues, “that was my fault.”  
  
“I probably didn’t need to assume you were lying, though. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me, by the way.”  
  
“I don’t care,” Derek mumbles, which isn’t a denial but Derek is still holding Stiles in close and doesn’t seem inclined to let go anytime soon. Stiles can’t really bring himself to care whether or not Laura likes him.  
  
Eventually, Maryann comes out and tells Stiles that Harris wants him, and they pull apart, reluctantly. Maryann looks wickedly delighted, and Stiles knows everyone’s going to hear about his hot alpha boyfriend. Oh well.  
  
“Call me later?” Derek asks, twisting his fingers into Stiles’.  
  
“Course,” Stiles says, and squeezes his hand. “You’re not getting rid of me now.”  
  
Derek’s answering smile is blinding. 

————

As it turns out, though, Stiles doesn’t actually need to call Derek, because when he gets outside sometime around 7, Derek is waiting for him with his car. The curb outside the office building isn’t exactly a spot for loitering and Stiles steps out just in time to see someone honk and go whizzing by with Derek flipping them off.  
  
Stiles grins and jogs across the sidewalk, not bothering to stop or slow down before he crashes delightedly into Derek’s side.  
  
“Miss me?” Stiles says, obnoxious, but Derek just smiles at him, turning so he can kiss Stiles in a manner that is hardly appropriate for a public space.  
  
Stiles recognizes that they are truly a walking cliche, but he doesn’t really care.  
  
“How was your day?” Derek asks, when they finally break apart.  
  
“Full of pissing Harris off purely by virtue of being happy,” Stiles says. “It was great, I thought he was going to have an aneurysm for a minute there.”  
  
“Oh?” Derek says, and Stiles knocks his shoulder into Derek’s.  
  
“He deserved it. How long have you been waiting out here?”  
  
Derek goes briefly, shockingly red, and Stiles cracks up.  
  
“You’re such a dork,” he says, affectionate. “Come on, where are we going?”  
  
“Misery,” Derek says, finally stepping back away from Stiles and around the car. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”  
  
Stiles eyes Derek skeptically across the stick as he slides into the passenger seat. “If you have more secret siblings, tell me now, don’t drag it out.”  
  
“Nah,” Derek says. “Same one.”  
  
Stiles, halfway through buckling up his seatbelt, releases the buckle and lets it be pulled back into the anchor.  
  
“Laura?” Stiles asks, “Laura is who you want me to meet? Your angry alpha sister? I don’t know if you remember this, Derek, but I’ve met her, and it didn’t go particularly well either time. She doesn’t like me.”  
  
“Put your seatbelt back on,” Derek says.  
  
“We could go home and have sex instead,” Stiles suggests, even as he tugs back down on the buckle and pulls it across his chest. “It’s been forever since you last fucked me. Okay, well, it’s been less than twenty-four hours, but it feels like forever.”  
  
He sticks his tongue out and waggles his eyebrows at Derek, whose eyes go dark despite the inherent ridiculousness of the face Stiles is making.  
  
“After this, I’m taking you home and we’re not getting out of bed for days,” Derek says, voice low and full of promises that send sparks up Stiles’ spine. “But right now - she’s my big sister. She’s going to learn to like you.”  
  
Stiles groans, and flops dramatically back against the seat as Derek starts the car, but it’s all a cover, and he doesn’t even think it’s a good one, because Stiles is still giddy. Derek wants him, and more than that, he wants Stiles to meet his pack - for Laura, so clearly the head of their small family unit, to accept Stiles. Usually, Stiles is pretty sure that’d send him into spirals of self-examination, overthinking traditional omega-alpha dynamics to check his own emotions. He does not want to be absorbed into some pack unit, pulled in as if he doesn’t have his own family, as if all he’s here for is to breed babies for the greater glory of the pack.  
  
But Stiles wants Derek, too, as more than just a bedwarmer for longer than he’s been willing to admit before now. It delights him that Derek wants that too.  
  
Stiles grins to himself, and sets his hand on Derek’s thigh. Derek looks away from the road for a second, and when he smiles back at Derek, Stiles lets himself believe this is something that will last.


End file.
